News

At the Crossroads of Language and Location is a Great Customer Experience

August 9, 2017

It’s August, and summer is coming to an end. Hopefully, you’ve gotten the chance to travel somewhere exciting, with only the handy sentences in the back of your guide book to help you find the best foods and beaches. If you haven’t gotten a chance to brush up on your foreign language skills this year, you may not have to go far to find a whole other linguistic world.

Even within the United States, different geographic areas use different words. Finding proof can be as easy as jumping in the car for a good, old-fashioned road trip. In Boston you might order jimmies on your ice cream, but you’ll have to ask for sprinkles in New York City. And while you can get a cold can of pop in Minnesota, you’ll need to order a soda in California. Put the sentence ‘there’s no jawn like home’ anywhere but Philadelphia and people will be scratching their heads. But to those in the City of Brotherly Love, the word jawn really does feel like home.

Think about it: if these differences exist for English in just the U.S., what about in the rest of the English-speaking world? How can we get everyone from Australia to Zimbabwe on the same page? Sure, we’re all speaking the same language, but as we’ve seen, location matters. In fact, the key is in location-based marketing. Targeted content, as it turns out, goes a long way when it comes to customer loyalty and improving the customer experience. Usually, this is done on an individual level by leveraging big data and artificial intelligence to make predictions based on a customer’s behavior. This level of data collection, however, is expensive and inaccessible to many companies. So instead of an individual level, what about personalizing content based on geography? Language and location are two things that bring people together. And targeted marketing can use hometown pride to deliver more personal content with a lower price tag.

Now let’s go beyond just English. What about in the French-speaking world, that spans 60 countries? Or the Arabic-speaking world, that spans 57? Because language really does matterwhen it comes to selling in a global marketplace. From providing self-help articles in a slew of different languages to being able to live chat in any language that comes your way, Language I/O provides the translation tools. But building a great customer experience comes down to you: to knowing your customer and making sure you speak their language.